The void was empty, dark—a place where light had no meaning, yet Rukia granted them vision anyway. Not through illumination, but through will alone.
Grace knelt beside her lady, hands steady despite the wrongness of this place. "How is it that we can hear ourselves even when sound doesn't exist?"
"I just needed us to communicate," Rukia said, her voice—or rather, her intent—arriving directly in Grace's mind. "So as our mouths move, the sound doesn't come out, but the words go straight to the target's head. That's how you heard me scream. That's how we communicate."
Grace nodded, understanding washing over her without the medium of air to carry it. In this dimension where time itself was negotiable, Rukia had crafted the barest essentials: vision without light, communication without sound, space without dimension. Everything pared down to pure function.
"It's time," Rukia said, and Grace saw the resolve hardening in her lady's expression—the look of a woman prepared for anything.
The labor began.
In a world with time, it might have taken hours. Here, it could have been moments or eternity. Grace had delivered children before, but never in a place that shouldn't exist, never for a woman whose eyes held depths that seemed to look beyond the present moment.
The first child came quickly. Too quickly.
The infant emerged into the void—silver eyes like his mother's, black hair like his father's—and immediately Grace understood why Rukia had created this place. The raw energy of non-existence crashed against the newborn like waves against a shore, seeping into him, saturating him. In any normal dimension, the feedback would have been catastrophic.
Here, there was nothing to catastrophically react.
"Grace," Rukia's intent was sharp, cutting. "Hold him. Don't let him leave this space yet."
Grace cradled the newborn, watching as his small form seemed to drink the void energy. His silver eyes flickered—there and not-there, present and absent. His skin shimmered with something that wasn't quite essence but felt far more primordial.
Minutes stretched. Or perhaps they contracted. Time had no authority here.
The child continued to absorb.
"The second one," Grace said, feeling the next child coming. "My lady, the second—"
"I know," Rukia said, and there was something in her tone that Grace couldn't place. Something complex and unreadable.
The second twin emerged, and he was different. Red eyes like his father's, silver hair like his mother's. Where his brother flickered with absorbed void energy, this one was solid, stable, normal. He came into this non-space the way any child might, crying soundlessly into a place that had no air to carry sound.
Grace held both infants now. One with silver eyes drinking impossibility. One with red eyes, perfect and untouched.
Identical in form, inverse in coloring, opposite in... something else Grace couldn't name.
"How long?" Grace asked, watching the first twin continue his absorption.
Rukia's face was drawn, exhausted—not from the birth, but from the weight of maintaining this pocket dimension, a space carved from nothing through sheer will.
"Until he stabilizes," Rukia said quietly. "Until what he's becoming... settles."
Grace held the Ackerman twins and waited.
In the void where nothing existed but could, the firstborn continued to drink deep of impossibility itself.